The Ukrainian Interior Ministry is investigating a scheme that has allegedly been used by President Petro Poroshenko's campaign to bribe voters ahead of the upcoming presidential election with money reportedly coming from the country's budget, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 12th March, 2019) The Ukrainian Interior Ministry is investigating a scheme that has allegedly been used by President Petro Poroshenko's campaign to bribe voters ahead of the upcoming presidential election with money reportedly coming from the country's budget, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said.
Avakov described the scheme to the ICTV channel, saying that the campaign team of a "pro-government" presidential candidate allegedly hired agitators who picked out 100 struggling Ukrainians and proposed to them to support the candidate, and if a person agreed to do that, he was paid 1,000 hryvnia ($38) from a state budget program.
"Then, all those who have been paid receive a phone call from the candidate's campaign office with a reminder that [the bribed voter] must vote for this particular person" Avakov said.
According to Avakov, the authorities have also received information that other candidates, including former Ukrainian Prime Minister and leader of the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party Yulia Tymoshenko, may have been involved in the bribing of voters as well.
"It does not mean that each signal [about the possible bribing] is true, it means that we are verifying [them]," the minister added.
The presidential election in Ukraine is scheduled for March 31, with almost 40 candidates running for the post.
According to the latest polls, comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy remains the front-runner in the race with almost 25 percent of projected votes, followed by Tymoshenko and Poroshenko.
